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Blizzard Sues Creator of WoW Bot
Ponca City, We Love You writes "Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, are suing Michael Donnelly, the creator of the MMO Glider program, which performs key tasks in the game automatically. Blizzard says the software bot infringes the company's copyright and potentially damages the game. 'Blizzard's designs expectations are frustrated, and resources are allocated unevenly, when bots are introduced into the WoW universe, because bots spend far more time in-game than an ordinary player would and consume resources the entire time,' Blizzard wrote in its legal submission to the court. More than 100,000 copies of the tool have been sold while more than 10 million people around the world play Warcraft. Donnelly says his tool does not infringe Blizzard's copyright because no 'copy' of the Warcraft game client software is ever made. The two parties are now awaiting a summary judgment in the case."
Bots are grossly overrated for MMOs for the most part. Sure, there are some few players that will use them in WoW and other games, but for the most part, people want to experience the game. And many bot users are very easy to spot, as their users don't put in enough to make it believable.
I am kind of surprised that Blizzard is doing this, but I think it's just a publicity thing, and they don't really care if they make any cash off of it. They are just trying to placate the masses on the forums that worry about every single little thing they can.
The reality is, bots make money for Blizzard. Once an account is banned, the player has to purchase a new box of the game to start playing again. And with the expansion, that's 2 boxes. So, Blizzard makes money off of the players that register new accounts/CDs every time they get banned.
Besides, most gold farmers are played by humans, not bots.
Maybe instead of suing people who run bots to avoid grinding, they should make grinding less boring/time-consuming? Grinding is really the only reason they aren't getting $15/mo from me.
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I believe the argument would go like this:
You have a right to copy the program into RAM in order to run it, if that copy is going to be used for a purpose that complies with the EULA.
However, here the programmer is using the program in a way that doesn't comply with the EULA. Therefore, he is not only violating the EULA, but also their copyright, because he is making a copy for an unauthorized purpose.
The problem is not bots, it's crappy game design. Once your paying customers start wanting to pay in order NOT to play your game, you know your designer is a complete retard. Then again, it seems that making games not very fun is a highly successful business model..Who would've guessed?
Infinite time means everything that can happen, will. You being you is absolutely incidental. You do not exist.
At most it might infringe upon the terms and conditions of WoW. But that would need to be taken up with the users, not the author.
Just another example of a company aiming its litigation at the wrong target.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
"Police are stupid anyway. I can wave around whatever I want in my hand in whatever direction I want to." Perhaps a poor analogy, but god damnit, you're not just running it in your memory. You're also wasting CPU time, memory, and storage space on their machines for a character that you're not even playing with most of the time you're on. You're going against the rules of the game (the ToS), you're automating exactly what the game's centered around because you find it boring and, most importantly, you're just being an ass.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
If the extra resources used are such a problem for them, why don't they just do the sensible thing and have a tiered pricing structure? If bots really use a lot more time than real players do, then it should be pretty easy for them to pick a number of hours per month which is sufficient for 99% of their actual players, and then charge anyone who uses more time a higher fee. It's a bit like all the ISPs crying foul over P2P users using "too much" data on their "unlimited" plans. If their pricing structure is untenable, then they should fix the pricing structure.
Also, if the bot doesn't do anything a player couldn't do anyway (if they were sufficiently skilled) then what does it matter? If it does do things the client doesn't allow, then it's reasonable to pursue him over that, but it seems like it'd be more straightforward to fix their server to not allow it.
The game already has to deal with a large range of players, from casual gamers who maybe get in a few hours a week to the obsessive teens who spend their every waking moment in the game levelling their character. A bot that does the tedious work gives casual players a chance to experience the game as a high level character that they probably wouldn't get otherwise. If Blizzard doesn't want people doing this, maybe they should make the game less tedious.
On the other hand, if Blizzard is successful at pursuing anyone using bots to make the game less of a chore, hopefully it'll result in a few less WoW addicts. Possibly they don't want people to experience the "end game", as then they might realise how boring and pointless the whole thing is and stop paying the monthly subscription fee.
On the whole, it does seem that they don't have a very strong case against the program's author, only against its users as they're the ones violating the ToS and so on. Possibly they could get him for reverse engineering the game code, which I presume he would've needed to do in order to write the program; but proving that could be difficult.
I'm not aware that Blizzard offered a free CD-Key validation service to the BNetD project, so that argument is invalidated.
Why is it that anyone who stands up for something worth standing up for (like the right to run a multiplayer game on your own terms) gets called stupid here when they get stamped on?
What were the BNetD team supposed to do? Roll over and throw away hundreds of man-hours of painstaking work when the bullies came along to try and sweep the flaws in their copy-protection scheme under the carpet? No, they stood up for the right to reverse engineer, for your right to enjoy your games how you choose, for the right to get on with their tinkering without interference from corporate bullies. A bunch of bad laws and incompetent judges later and they've lost the case though in defiance of all reason and common sense.
And what do you have to say for it? that they're stupid for fighting the battle. It's not just 'fun to villify' Blizzard for this - they deserve far worse than villification - they've abused the courts to wreck other people's hard work because it exposed the obvious flaw in their copy-protection system, but for a game which was already old enough that it was past the best of its cash-cow days anyway - StarCraft and BroodWar were already in the budget section by the time Blizzard kicked up a fuss, and as for D1 and WarII... there was no legitimate moral reason to object to the project, there was no meaningful business reason, the entire action was, in my opinion, pure spite.
When someone comes along to hurt you out of spite, you don't just cower and crawl away so they'll leave you alone, you stand up to them and you won't be stupid for doing it. That they lost when they stood up is to the eternal shame and humiliation of the whole system of 'justice' which has let down the BNetD team, and every person who thought that it could, just once, find correctly.
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Just another example of a company aiming its litigation at the wrong target.
Or... the right target. They could cut off every individual botting user... and they've tried that. But, these users are impossible to find because of this one individual millionaire who managed to make his program (currently) undetectable.
So... they could sue every individual user. But, we run into the "finding them" problem again.
So... they could sue the one person making it all possible, and profiting handsomely for it. This is the logical target - go for the one person responsible rather than lots of individuals - but also, apparently, the most difficult. Going for WoW Glider's maker solves the problem; going for his customers doesn't. So, you can't fault them for trying.
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I wonder if they'll try and force him to give up his source during discovery. That might very well be the angle they're looking at in this whole thing.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.